Apple's MobileMe back up and running

Californian kit maker Apple said Tuesday that it has restored service to the remaining 1 per cent of MobileMe users affected by an earlier outage.

The company has also managed to retrieve all historical messages, allaying user fears after an earlier admission that as much as 10 per cent of mail received between July 16 and July 18 “may have been lost”.

The MobileMe service launched alongside the iPhone 3G earlier this month and immediately encountered problems, forcing Apple to establish a status blog to keep disgruntled users updated.

Heralded as “Exchange for the rest of us,” MobileMe is an internet-based service that enables iPhone 3G users to access their email, contacts, calendars and photo albums via their iPod, Mac or PC as well. A foray into the world of ‘cloud computing’, MobileMe will eventually replace its precursor, the .Mac service.

But capacity issues dogged the service at launch, preventing many users from accessing their information, then disaster struck as a number of users were locked out of their accounts and a significant amount of email was temporarily lost.

For those still affected by issues the company has set up a dedicated chat line and has issued a memo on how to restore lost data.